Doors Open Milwaukee

Right in our own backyard!

This past weekend we re-discovered our city. Milwaukee is old. Really old. Ok maybe not Boston old, but it’s one of those places where time seems to stand still throughout much of the geographical location. Doors Open Milwaukee was organized by Historic Milwaukee, Inc., a non-profit organization dedicated to the education and awareness of all things Old Milwaukee and the preservation of its architecture and history.

For the better part of Saturday and Sunday, nearly 100 buildings all over the city literally opened their doors to the public, completely free of charge. While you could self-tour most of these buildings at any time, at 9am on Saturday morning, hundreds lined up for the chance to get tickets to scheduled in-depth tours, also free of charge! These in-depth tours included everything from a walking tour of “the good, the bad & the ugly” that Milwaukee architecture has to offer, to a night-time ghost walk in the Historic Third Ward. We explored a total of nine historical spots throughout the city, unable to squeeze in dozens more we wanted to see.

The Grain Exchange

On an otherwise dreary and dismal September morning, quite giddy and armed with our cameras, we first hit up the Mackie building and Grain Exchange. The staff was nice enough to let several of us sneak inside to marvel at the gorgeous interior, despite their wedding reception preparations. You’d never know it, but this room was once a trading floor (hence the name Grain Exchange). The restorations have left us with a gorgeous place that looks exactly as it once did one hundred years ago. From the sublime to the ridiculously awesome, we hustled over to Milwaukee’s tallest building several blocks away. While US Bank’s 41 story structure is a bit of a joke compared to our sister city 90 miles away, the view is actually spectacular as it is unhindered by surrounding skyscrapers other cities might boast.

I’m on top of the world! Or just the US Bank building.

The top is typically closed to the public, underlined by the fact that we were actually escorted by security to the waiting area. We stood in the seemingly epic line for barely 15 minutes before lift off. In order to get from the elevator to the windows, we had to traverse a huge, dark room full of varying sizes of pipes and ventilation systems. But then our first glimpse of the sprawling city below our feet was one I’m sure no visitor will ever forget. This is a view of our home that is very rare, unless of course you work for US Bank! Aside from gawking at the miles and miles of Milwaukee at 360 degrees, one thing we noted is that it’s just a tiny 8 inch piece of cellophane over the lights that makes the top of the building change colors. It’s the little things.

The Riverside Theater

Next stop: Our beloved theaters! Having rocked perhaps 50-60 shows between the two of us and the two theaters, the Riverside and Pabst are as much a part of our Milwaukee lives as our jobs and families. The Riverside opened in 1928, burned down in 1966 because of one little cigarette, repaired and reopened in 1984, and was finally artistically-renovated in 2005 to bring it back to what it once was. Walking backstage while a recorded performance of The Swell Season played on the gigantic movable film screen was already pretty cool, but taking the ancient elevator up to the Green Room was amazing. So many rockstars had sat on these couches, played that vinyl, won a game of foosball, and sipped on Milwaukee’s own Alterra [now Colectivo] coffee…right here! Crazy. After taking tons of photos of a place we had ironically visited too many times to mention, we repeated the adventure over at the Pabst.

Galaga at the Pabst

This theater has a similar past of rebuilding: constructed in 1895, renovated in 1928, restored in 1976, and remodeled in 2001. We headed backstage, and down an extremely tight stairwell, into the Green Room, which was bigger and actually brought back memories of friends’ parents’ basements in high school. Super Mario cued up on an old tube tv and rock magazines spread out all over the table, it was actually cooler to watch the little kids scream “This is my heaven! MOM LOOK this is my heaven!!!” as they plopped onto beanbag chairs and beemed at the full-size, old school arcade games. Next time either of us go to a show at Riverside or Pabst, this is an experience that will always fondly return.

Across the street from the Pabst sits another skyscraper: City Hall was not only Milwaukee’s tallest building in 1895, but one of the tallest in the world, can you believe it?! Neither of us had ever stepped inside City Hall, so you can imagine our surprise when we discovered that it is actually “hollow”! In other words, you walk inside and almost immediately jerk your head up to the top of the large diamond-shaped glass ceiling, eight stories up!

Milwaukee City Hall

We both took another ancient elevator up to the top, looked over the edge of the balcony railing, and experienced a surprising bout of vertigo despite being only eight stories up! Soon thereafter a security guard asked us if we were on the tour and were promptly asked to head back downstairs when we replied no. Whoops. We headed back out into the now-sunny skies. After perhaps almost getting mugged by a guy with a bag of chips, we decided we were starving and made a quick food stop at Milwaukee’s newish Public Market, open year-round, it resides in an area that was once the old Commission Row in the 19th century, a wholesale produce market for a century!

Our next location was the newly renovated Pritzlaff: an absolutely epic building, constructed in 1875, it originally held Pritzlaff Hardware, and then Hack’s Furniture many years later, which closed in 1984.

Pritzlaff Building

The glorified warehouse went through several unsuccessful bouts of potential restoration for residential purposes, until finally in 2006, Sunset Investors began renovating the entire building inside and out! The building officially opened for business in 2010, for residential, commercial, storage and office use. And lest we forget! The expansive open-areas on the first floor can actually be rented out for events big and small for a very reasonable rate. Are you into urban exploring AND getting married? Well we just found your dream venue!

Our final day-time stop was the Mitchell Leather Factory in the Third Ward, the building constructed in 1915 and was actually part of an old tannery.

Mitchell Leather Factory

While no tannery exists there now, a 50+ year old leather business is currently run there by Jerry Mitchell’s son David, who hand-picks cowhides and constructs hundreds of different kinds of leather goods right there in a one-room (well, one HUGE room) factory. The machinery in there alone could dazzle a photographer for days, from early 20th century sewing machines to a large pea-green rivet-making contraption. The actual creation-process the small workcrew tackles appears complex to us laymen. Piles of hide go on for what seems like miles, we can hardly imagine what a day’s work is really like.

Swingin Door

We concluded our Doors Open self-guided tour with a stop for a beer at The Newsroom and dinner/more beers at the Swingin’ Door Saloon, two of Milwaukee’s oldest pubs. The Newsroom is the current headquarters for the Milwaukee Press Club and contains their most prized historical artifacts: first their mascot, a mummified cat named Anubis that two members stole back in 1897; and second, their Signatures Collection, more than 1200 plaques signed by famous political figures, athletes, and celebrities, dating back to late 1800s. Teddy and FDR, Babe Ruth, Bette Davis and Charles Lindbergh are just a few of the signatures hung on the walls.

The spot where Swingin’ Door Saloon sits first existed as a Western Union Telegraph station in 1889, but it has been a pub/tavern/bar for the past 70+ years. Originally called Grain Exchange Tavern, the pub became Swingin’ Door Saloon when Michael Murphy, the Swingin’ Door Barber Shop owner next door bought it in the ’60s when shaggy hairstyles left barbers in the lurch. Our Chicago visitors for the night agreed with us that these are Milwaukee institutions that can’t be missed. Both spots can get simultaneously cozy AND raucous, depending on the night you want to have!

To conclude? Crazy cool event. We anticipate Historic Milwaukee will put on a great show next year too. Despite the rain–buckets at times–it seemed like the typically vacant downtown was a bevy of activity last weekend! Definitely a nice change of scenery for those of us who believe downtown Milwaukee should always be bustling. Perhaps more of our people feel the same after seeing the city from a different, more spectacular angle.